Matthew Ikpa, a third-year sociology major at UCI, left, and Eunice Pak, a third-year biology major, hold signs that demand the UC board of Regents stops raising tuition fees until the country’s fiscal crisis has resolved and the U.S. job market stabilizes while speakers address a crowd in front of UCI’s Aldrich Hall administration building Wednesday.

Editor’s note:below is an excerpted letter from Cathy Lawhon, Media Relations Director for UC Irvine. You can find the entire letter online here.

IRVINE, Cathy Lawhon, Media Relations Director, UC Irvine: Scott Martindale’s report on the University of California and UC Irvine salaries [“Top-heavy UC may leave middle class shut out,” Front Page, Jan. 8] demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about the funding structure and role of the UC system on so many fronts it’s difficult to know where to begin. But allow me to try:

He cites students’ concerns that rising tuition is paying for a “sprawling bureaucracy of hospitals.” In truth, no student fees support UC Irvine Medical Center, which plays a crucial part in the academic function for UCI’s medical students and the research function for its physicians/faculty.

UC Irvine Medical Center is an enterprise operation. Its operating revenue largely comes from the services it provides, not from taxpayer or tuition dollars. That includes administrator salaries and as much as $50 million that the medical center annually sends to the UC Irvine School of Medicine to supplement medical education. In short, the funding mechanism is exactly the reverse of what was implied.

Incidentally, and almost without exception, the UC medical centers have committed to provide their communities with services that private community hospitals choose not to, possibly because they are hugely expensive. Orange County’s emergency medical system would collapse without UC Irvine’s Level 1 trauma center. No one else could duplicate that service.

Equally mystifying is his slam on “auxiliary research institutions.” I have attended nearly every protest rally held at UCI over the past five years and I have never heard students protest the research function of UCI, perhaps because they understand that:

Research is funded by a combination of government and private-industry grants, last year totaling more than $300 million and garnered by the Vice Chancellor for Research and his staff – not by student fees.

Martindale also quotes a student saying that the system runs for the benefit of the bureaucracy and that administrators have received pay increases. In truth:

Chancellor’s salaries have remained absolutely flat for the last four years. Other incumbent executive staff salaries have not increased during the period in which fees have escalated. State disinvestment – not executive pay increases – is the direct cause of fee hikes.

And finally, the story – especially the front-page presentation – links UCI’s executive compensation with some imagined regents’ cabal of privatization forces planning the demise of the system as we know it. That is patently misleading and disingenuous.

In linking its annual UCI salary story with the larger issues the reporter attempts to explore, the story did nothing to contribute to the constructive community discussion the Register purports to foster. In fact, it added to a reservoir of misinformation that makes real problem-solving more difficult.

A campus dream world

NEWPORT BEACH, Ron Davies: The article “Top-heavy UC may leave middle class shut out,” [Jan. 8] exposed more of the obscene compensation for administrators in the UC system who outnumber the teachers. They live in the same dream world as the “Occupy” rabble they “educated.” And there lies the problem. Except for a small number of super-wealthy college students who don’t work after graduation, the rest (should) expect to get a job in the “real world” so they can pay off the loans that pay the salaries of their teachers and administrators. The educational system that stole their money may owe them a living, but the rest of us don’t.

The problem for the “Occupy” students is that there is no warning label on courses like (these are real): “The Science of Superheroes” at UC Irvine and “Arguing with Judge Judy: Popular ‘Logic’ On TV Judge Shows” at UC Berkeley or degrees such as “Queer Musicology” at UCLA. The label should say: “Caution, this course will not prepare you to work in the real world; get a job or support yourself.”

There are simple solutions to our unfunded liabilities and out-of-control retirement benefits in the UC system. Enroll UC and government employees (teachers, police, fire included) in Social Security as their only state-sponsored retirement. Benefits won’t start until they reach 65.

Tenure, which doesn’t exist in the real world, is gone. They will occasionally get unpaid sabbaticals to look for a real job to prove that no one will pay them one-fourth of what they now earn. Their pay, retirement and benefits must be posted on their office door so that their students realize their administrators/teachers are the 1 percent.

UC employees can no longer compare salaries/benefits with other teaching institutions. That is a merry-go-round of increases based on nothing in the real world. If they want a raise they can look for a private-sector job or transfer to that institution.

Finally, no government employee, politician or teacher can send their children to private schools until we have a voucher system. The system would self-correct just as Obamacare would be repealed if politicians were enrolled like the rest of us.

Costly student loans

ANAHEIM HILLS, Arnold Gregg: Continually rising college tuition costs have been made possible by ever-increasing government-backed student loans. This is similar to the housing mess where increasing home prices were fueled by unbridled lending practices also backed by the government. Universities now have little incentive to manage their personnel and administrative costs because they can just pass them along, in the form of higher tuition, that their customers (students) will just borrow from enabling government-backed lenders. Hopefully, students will finally figure this out and redirect their scorn from the taxpayers to the administrators and politicians who have built this house of cards.

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